over-egg the pudding

Meanings

verbover-egg the pudding (third-person singular simple present over-eggs the pudding, present participle over-egging the pudding, simple past and past participle over-egged the pudding)

present singular third person over-eggs the pudding · participle present over-egging the pudding · participle past over-egged the pudding · past over-egged the pudding · alternative overegg the pudding

intransitiveTo embellish too much; to exaggerate.First known use mid 19th c.
If you really want to over-egg the pudding, you can, a month or so after the funeral, organize a memorial service.
2009, Virginia Ironside, The Virginia Monologues, Penguin UK, →ISBN
5 more examples
But hard riding men, in strange countries, are apt now and then to over-egg the pudding, as the Yorkshire landlord told his Grace of Cleveland.
1839 September, Nimrod [pseudonym; Charles James Apperley], “A Hunting Tour in the Midland Counties: The Quorn: The Belvoir: And the Cottesmore”, in Craven [pseudonym; John William Carleton], editor, The Sporting Review, a Monthly Chronicle of the Turf, the Chase, and Rural Sports in All Their Varieties, London: Rudolph Ackermann, […], →OCLC, page 187
The toast was drunk with tremendous applause, Mr. Jorrocks acting as fugleman—“but as we mustn't over-egg the pudding,” as the Yorkshire farmers say, we will reserve the other proceedings of the evening for another chapter.
1845, Robert Smith Surtees, chapter XVI, in Hillingdon Hall, published 1888, page 161
Our established Press bosses are no fools. They know the risks, and they will be careful not to over-egg the pudding.
1960 June 22, The Earl of Arran, “The Newspapers”, in parliamentary debates (House of Lords), column 471
[M]any British officials, as David Holden deduced from conversations with them in the Crescent bar in the mid-fifties, were 'afflicted with a familiar form of colonial myopia known as localitis' – […] Maybe Holden slightly overeggs the pudding.
1991, Glen Balfour-Paul, “Comparisons, without Odium”, in The End of Empire in the Middle East: Britain’s Relinquishment of Power in Her Last Three Arab Dependencies, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, published 1992, →ISBN, page 162
Adverbs too ('she remarked, tersely') seem to over-egg the pudding or else acquire undue weight in the mouth of a supposedly artless narrator.
2010, Alan Bennett, “Introduction”, in The Complete Talking Heads, Picador, →ISBN, page 32
Synonyms: gild the lily